You’ve probably already intuited this but this move is mostly performative on the part of Pelosi and other Dems, an easy way to score points with the Dems’ true suburban and urban PMC/petty-bourgie base. I have however heard the argument that 25th-ing Trump would have the effect of locking him out of pulling a Grover Cleveland in 2024, establishing a pretext for Trump to get ratfucked in the primary like Bernie did in 2020.

Cooperation by the “respectable” neocon GOP ghouls like Pence and Romney in this process is also rapidly accelerating the neoliberals’ rehabilitation of these figures, similar to Dubya. MSM libs are already starting to suggest that Pence and Romney could come out of this looking like “heroes” for backstabbing Trump in the name of preserving democracy and national stability. Believe it or not the “middle-class” liberals still genuinely believe in the liberal-democratic platitudes reflected in so many of the congressional Dems’ panegyrics to American “democracy” on Wednesday, the stubborn insisting that the US is “not a banana republic” and so on.

I so badly wanted to shout at the TV as I heard family members earnestly listening to these cloying, saccharine speeches, knowing what I know about US liberal-democracy even in comparison to less arcane and less Byzantine parliamentary models later introduced in European countries. We have the shitty alpha/early-access version of liberal democracy and US citizens taught to practically worship our stupid outdated constitution know fucking nothing about even the Westminster model in the UK, it’s fucking sickening. They’re by and large too un-self-aware to realize that safeguards against “mob rule” and demagogues means their own disenfranchisement. They fail to recognize that the separation of executive and legislative powers means no elected body is ever truly accountable despite decades of evidence in front of their fucking faces.